The invention relates to a rotary internal combustion engine.
Currently, the most widely used internal combustion engines have cylinders with reciprocating pistons operating in Otto or Diesel cycles. The pistons reciprocate linearly within cylinders, alternately changing directions of movement at the end of each stroke.
This type of engine generally requires four strokes of the piston to complete one full combustion cycle. In each of those strokes, the piston changes its linear course and actually stops and starts again, every time, losing its momentum in each of the four times this happens in just one combustion cycle. Further, the linear movement of the piston has to be changed to rotational movement via a crankshaft and the power transmission of this is sinusoidal and passes through zero (no power transmission) when the crank and piston connecting rod are aligned at two opposite dead points in each rotation of the crankshaft. Furthermore, the crank lever arm is necessarily short in order to keep the stroke length short, whereby the torque produced is low. As a consequence, the efficiency or performance of these engines is very poor and the operational costs and pollution are excessive.
These technical limitations were the main reasons that led to the development of rotary engines. Currently, however, only the Wankel engine has achieved some commercial success.
The reason for this is because the piston, or rotor in this case, although it does not stop, does not produce sufficient power, either, because of its very short lever arm and low admission capacity. This deficiency is partially overcome by using two rotors with turbo-charged admission and high-speed revolutions that, however, cause excessive wear to the engine and increase fuel consumption to the extent that it becomes uneconomic and over-polluting for any use other than in sports cars, and is not used for family cars.